The Art of Raw Conversion #007

David Coffin's
"dcraw"

Convert all
Raw Files on any OS Platform

(4/25/2003)

Quite simply, it's an ANSI C program to decode any raw image from
any digital camera on any computer running any operating system. It
is a unique and vital tool in the world of digital photography.

Thousands of people use dcraw without knowing it, as Bibble, BreezeBrowser,
IrfanView, Conceiva, and the Adobe Camera Raw plugin all contain source
code from dcraw. After six years and 1500 hours of unpaid labor, dcraw
now supports fifty-eight cameras from seven different manufacturers,
in only 2600 lines of C code.

dcraw fills a serious void left by camera makers, who refuse to release
any documentation or source code describing their raw file formats.
Even worse, many of these formats use secret algorithms to compress
image data into an inscrutable pile of random ones and zeroes.

Without dcraw:

Raw photos can only be decoded in Windows or MacOS. Users of other
operating systems are out of luck.

Windows programmers who write image viewers are at the mercy of
buggy, poorly documented "developer kits". None of these
kits allow direct manipulation of raw data.

There is no guarantee that archived raw photos will be readable
five, ten, or a hundred years from now. Even today, some decoding
software won't work beyond Windows 98, while Dell ships laptops that
only run Windows XP.

dcraw follows the UNIX philosophy of "do one thing and do it
well". I'm always eager to add new camera formats, but I rarely
accept new features. dcraw has no user interface except command-line
arguments, and it writes only three output formats.

dcraw.c is kept under strict revision control, with the full history
available for download. Each new revision must be tested against my
entire photo collection before the code is released.

Because of its clean design and free license, other programmers easily
add the features they need, or cut and paste dcraw.c into their own
software. Those who send a donation receive a CD-R containing sample
photos from all supported cameras.